Since,
Apple has long been recognized for its exceptional attention to typography. That is why I am surprised that Smart Punctuation in iOS does not respect national typographic conventions for quotation marks.
For example, when writing in Czech, iOS automatically inserts English quotation marks (“…”) instead of the correct Czech form („…“), and there is currently no option to change this behavior.
This may seem like a minor detail, but smartphones have become the primary writing tool for millions of people. As a result, the default option of the software does more than automate typing — it shapes writing habits. Or Even more, most users start assuming that automatically inserted punctuation is correct for their language.
When iOS consistently uses English quotation marks in Czech text, it unintentionally contributes to the gradual disappearance of Czech typographic conventions. Even professionals often leave the default quotation marks unchanged because correcting them manually in everyday writing is impractical and slows down their writting.
Typography is part of every language’s cultural identity. Localization should therefore include not only translated interfaces, but also language-specific typographic standards.
Therefore, I would like to suggest that iOS should automatically use quotation marks according to the active keyboard language (or provide a setting to choose the quotation mark style).
Czech users would receive „…“, French users « … », German users „…“ or »…« according to regional conventions, and so on.
This small change would improve localization, respect linguistic diversity, history, and help preserve national typographic traditions. With the current implementation, Apple unintentionally contributes not only to the widespread use of incorrect writing, but also to the gradual erosion of national typographic traditions and language-specific writing conventions.
Daniel